A lone hacker known as Guccifer 2.0 has taken full responsibility for the cyberattack against the Democratic National Committee, revealing a series of documents purportedly from DNC servers.
This contradicts the DNC's initial accusation that Russia was behind the attack.
Guccifer 2.0 published several confidential files on a WordPress blog, claiming to have sent “thousands of files and messages” to Wikileaks and stating that “they will be published soon.”
After leaking an opposition file containing the investigation into Donald Trump, Guccifer 2.0 followed it up with alleged financial information about the Democratic Party and its donors. The hack was initially reported to be the work of Russian government agencies on Tuesday by CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC to investigate the data breach.
Guccifer 2 then mocked solid cybersecurity by saying that,
“CrowdStrike announced that the DNC servers had been hacked by ‘ sophisticated ’ hacker groups. I’m so happy that the company values my skills so much! But in reality, it was easy, very easy.”
CrowdStrike insists its initial analysis suggests that hackers from the Russian government were behind the attack. In an earlier post, they stated:
“On June 15, 2016, a blog post published on WordPress by an individual using the alias Guccifer 2.0 claiming credit for the breach at the Democratic National Committee presented documents that appeared to come from the DNC.
Whether this publication is part of a Russian disinformation campaign is something we are investigating through the authenticity and provenance of the documents.
However, these claims have not diminished our findings regarding Russian government involvement, parts of which have been documented to the public and the larger security community.”
